My Year 10 class took a well-deserved break today to have some fun with Flickr and the Big Huge Labs Motivator tool. The initial part of the lesson covered copyright issues and Creative Commons, then we got to work with the Motivator tool to create some posters on the theme of urban morphology. No particular reason – just some gratuitous creativity.

I put togther a quick example gallery, using the first four terms that came to mind:

I made the above images very quickly using the first four words that sprang to mind. The exercise I envisage is more explicitly geographical than the Artwork Earth images. Elusive images (such as the barchan dune) could be given to students with better spatial understanding, therefore differentiating the exercise. The results could make a really good display, or used as a visual glossary of key terms.

I’m rapidly talking myself into getting a smartphone. Not just for the live GPS tracking (see previous post), but because of concepts like Semapedia. In essence, Semapedia is about tagging real world locations with internet-based information, via a mobile phone. This could be a great (and highly subversive) fieldwork activity. Ogle Earth has posted an interesting article about Semapedia, together with a link to a Google Earth file for viewing some of the recently tagged locations.

I’ve printed out my first Semapedia tags – can you guess where they are going?

The file is designed to be played as a Tour with the terrain turned on.

To make the placemarks I used thumbnail images from a Flickr photoset downloaded to my computer. The placemarks include a link to the larger version of the image. I tethered the placemarks to the ground in order to improve the fly-through. The technique was especially useful where two images were taken in virtually identical locations such as at the edge of the tarn at Cwm Cau.

To add images as placemarks, click the “Advanced” checkbox in the Edit Placemark dialogue box. Add the image in the “Style” tab by browsing to it’s location in the Icon file/URL entry box. See image below:

To make the placemark float as a tethered image click the “Location” tab, select “Relative to ground” and move the slider to float the placemark at the desired altitude. If you want to tether it using a line to the ground, check the “Draw lines connecting points to ground” box. See image below:

I’m really impressed with the scripts at Yuan.CCV Web Experiments, especially the GMiF application. It adds a small button to the Flickr toolbar entitled Gmap. clicking this displays any photos you’ve geo-tagged directly in Google Maps. You can also add geo-tags to a photograph using the same tool and it’s incredibly quick and user friendly.

Simply click the Gmap button and then select the desired location by pointing and clicking on the map. With one further click you can add a description and comment as well as geo-tags, and the script even pings Geobloggers for you, so the photos show up straight away on that site.

Now you could easily use the Geobloggers interface to create a file to display your pictures in Google Earth.
An absolutely superb tool for adding value to photographs in the geography classroom.